Saturday, 25 May 2013

Telstar Sound Drone - Comedown

Album review by kev@thesoundofconfusion.co.uk

For a brief summary of this album, may we refer you to the band name and album title. For a little more in-depth analysis, read on. As with many current drone and psych bands, Copenhagen's Telstar Sound Drone are a trio; it seems three competent musicians can be all that's required to make a decent barrier of noise, and as you will have guessed, that's what this album is all about. These are not sparse sounds, these are heavy drones and squalls of psychedelic sound that bring both repetitiveness and colour at the same time, generally avoiding the sludge that some misfiring drone bands create.

That said, if you're looking for some three-minute, radio-friendly unit-shifters then you're embarking up the wrong sonic tree. The closest we come to this is the spangly, acid-frazzled 'Satellited' which you could almost describe as sunkissed. But not quite. The way this long-awaited (they formed in 2007) debut album starts gives you a closer picture of where they're coming from and where they're headed. This is dense and droning, almost shoegaze-like sound; it's heavy in terms of the dead-weight of the song, but the guitar provides flashes of brightness amidst the smoky fog. If you're going to pick a template for space/drone/psych-rock then you can do worse.

There's a touch of Spacemen 3 about 'Feels Like A Ride' (never a bad thing) and it's a more ambient piece than those that went before, soon developing into a percussive drone of a high standard. Waves of vibration come emanating from the centre of the slow-motion sound explosion of 'Now See How', a definite highlight; then comes the uptempo 'Evaporation', one of the more immediate tracks, you can see why it was chosen as a single and it ties in more closely with the current psych revival. 'Love Are Lost' encapsulates just about everything that the band are trying to achieve on this album in a single song; it's a little bit of all that they're about. They wrap things up with the dying star drone of 'Cabin Fever'; at which point we say thank you very much and skip back to the start...